Pages

Monday, 19 November 2012

A tale of planner fail

We have all experienced it in some shape or form; attempting to cram too much into our days, using more tabs than a guitar enthusiast website, and generally asking far too much of our planning companions. Planner fail is something we all contend with at some point… unless your name is Martha Stewart.

Currently, I am having a few difficulties with the battle for successful life organisation; mainly caused by a lack of funds and a severe need of expensive hole punches in several sizes. But I digress…

While I have only recently broken into the world of the filofax, I have not gone my whole life without a planner. For many of my school years I was surgically bound to a student planner, forced upon us to remove any excuse for forgetting home work or PE kits. I remember one in particular had a collage of school photographs on the cover, one of which was a student diving into the swimming pool (which is now a car park). You can imagine how the student felt as the image was used without both her, and her parent’s permission!

These student planners, as primitive as they were, helped me remember what I was supposed to be doing with myself at a very chaotic point in my life (don’t ever let them tell you your school years are the best of your life!). But they were messy, small, impossible to customise and exceptionally prone to the not-so-perfect binding giving out on you all together! By the end of a school year many of us were left with something that resembled a collection of dated postcards more than a diary.

Before these there was ‘the green planner’. I’m not sure if I still have the green planner lurking about somewhere in the depths of my bedroom, but I remember it vividly in all its translucent green plasticity; and how I never wrote more than my name in it.

I assume this is the most common form of planner fail; purchasing a new diary, full of hope and dreams of all the wonderful things you will do together, yet never writing more than “This belongs to…” neatly on the inside cover. I’ve suffered this with more than one sketchbook/diary/notebook over the years only achieving some form of order with ugly A4 wire bound notepads during my years at university. Over a year after graduation and I’m still attempting to work through some of these!.. and resist adding to their numbers.

I’m curious as to how other people overcome the Bambi days of their first proper planner.

How does one find purpose or meaning amongst those thinly ruled pages?